Well after 3 days of trying to install 5.9 SOHO, I've given up. Can not get the network to stay up after a reboot, can't get the screen to come back on after it suspends. Looks like he is going back to Mandriva. Vector runs GREAT on my desktop but I cannot get that laptop to work with Vector. Tried Light, Gold and SOHO. Well at least my desktop works. Other than his POS Compaq Vector is a great distro.

Instead of giving up how about giving us a chance to work through and solve your problems? Doing so might also help the VL developers make things work better out of the box in VL 6.0.

Are you using tuxonice for suspend/resume or are you using something unique to Compaq? If so, how have you configured it? Are you using your swap partition or a dedicated hibernation partition?

Re: the network, there is a known issue that is easily solved with some network drivers. What sort of network chipset does your laptop have? Which driver does it use?

I'd be really surprised if we can't get your Compaq working correctly with either SOHO or Light.

-Cait

Thanks for the offer. I am reinstalling now. THe suspend was never configured during install of SOHO The display died during the Nvidia driver install. It does use the broadcom 43xx chipset for the network card and Nvidia MCP51 bridge for the nic. Neither are detected during install. As soon as I reload I'll post lspci lsmodChuck

I am guessing the wireless is the problem. The bcm43XX, softmac, and mac are giving you problems. You need to remmod them then try Ndiswrapper. Next the bcml file is not correctyou should be seeing in the line from ndiswrapper -l <installed> <present>

Broadcom chips can be a challenge. Which is why I delete the /etc/ndiswrapper dir and thenstart from scratch.

Go to Ndiswrapper site and follow the instructions.

Nvidia MCP51 bridge are not recognized. How did you come to that conclusion?

I am guessing the wireless is the problem. The bcm43XX, softmac, and mac are giving you problems. You need to remmod them then try Ndiswrapper. Next the bcml file is not correctyou should be seeing in the line from ndiswrapper -l <installed> <present>

Broadcom chips can be a challenge. Which is why I delete the /etc/ndiswrapper dir and thenstart from scratch.

Go to Ndiswrapper site and follow the instructions.

Nvidia MCP51 bridge are not recognized. How did you come to that conclusion?

Your wireless is recognized by lspci. It is not being recognized by ndiswrapper.

Which is what already stated.

Please READ what I am pointing out. There is a conflict by using the kernel modules and ndiswrapper. They are two different things. They do create conflicts. So either you can disable to kernel modules that I listed and try ndiswrapper or disable ndiswrapper and setup the firmware for the modules.

As far as resuming is concerned. Mine was a uncooperative bugger until I figured it out. When resuming I would see disk activity and then nothing else. Until one time when was just right in the sunlight and noticed there was "something" on my screen, but there just wasn't a backlight shining through the displayed stuff.

I'm showing since you will also need to have the "resume" part added so Tux on ice will know where your swap partition is when storing data when you attempt to hibernate (Just in case you didn't know already).

Once you get your ndiswrapper working properly, you may find it interferes with your hibernate or suspend. On this machine, and many machines for that matter the ndiswrapper needs unloaded before hibernate or suspend. Then it's reloaded upon resuming and then the network restarted. I have a script take care of all this for me. Here's what I call sleep.sh:

Your wireless is recognized by lspci. It is not being recognized by ndiswrapper.

Which is what already stated.

Please READ what I am pointing out. There is a conflict by using the kernel modules and ndiswrapper. They are two different things. They do create conflicts. So either you can disable to kernel modules that I listed and try ndiswrapper or disable ndiswrapper and setup the firmware for the modules.

Pick one not both since that is the problem.

Bigpaws

Ok I removed the NDISwrapper that came with 5.9 and installed the newest. I also installed the newest xp drivers and got the wireless to turn on and be configured. But when I restart lo and behold the wireless will not come on. When I go into command line and type in ifconfig up the wireless powers on.

I am brand new to slack based distros, more used to .deb or RPM styles. Got spoiled with the auto configure of them. SO any advice in showing me what to enter will be great.

Actually, for most wireless cards automagic configuration isn't a problem with Vector Linux. Broadcom cards with VL 5.9 (2.6.22.19 kernel) are another story for the moment. VL 6.0, with new Broadcom kernel modules, will likely be easier with some cards.

Anyway, it's easy to set wireless to start on boot. Go into VASMCC (the Control Center) or VASM, click on Network, click on WIreless, click on Enable. That's it!

If you want the command line way of doing it I'll be happy to provide it but I kind of wanted to show that it isn't any harder in VL than in any other distro. You just have to get used to different tools